Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation - DX12 & Vulkan Short Analysis

GTX 1080 – DirectX 12:

First up we are going to look at how the GTX 1080 performed under DirectX 12. Looking at the results from the first benchmark, we see it achieved an average frame rate of 36.6 FPS, which matches the CPU frame rate reported. The CPU frame rate is the estimate of the performance if the game were not GPU bound. I am unsure why it then says the frames were GPU bound under the different loads, especially as I would expect my 4-thread CPU to be the bottleneck here.

The second run of the benchmark shows almost identical performance with an average and CPU frame rate of 36.7 FPS. Nothing too surprising here, so how about we look at the Vulkan results?

GTX 1080 – Vulkan:

Immediately we see something is different here with the CPU frame rate being significantly higher than the actual average frame rate, at 45.8 FPS compared to 33.6 FPS. The second run shows this as well, with higher numbers at 34.4 FPS for the total average and 48.8 FPS for the CPU average. While the average frame rate is lower than it was for DX12, this CPU frame rate is much higher.

If we look at the graphs as well, either those in the Benchmark Summary or those I made, we will see that under Vulkan, the driver overhead, which is based on the time spent in the driver, that Vulkan is ahead here. The dots are much tighter together, although it is hard to tell if they are any lower overall.

It seems that as far as the CPU is concerned, Vulkan is preferred when paired with the GTX 1080. The time spent in the driver is more consistent and the frame time on the CPU was also often lower than the total frame time, as compared to DX12 where they often matched. Unfortunately, the overall frame rate average also decreased, so while the CPU might be able to go fast, the net experience may be worse with Vulkan than with DX12.